February 5, 2010

An oyster in a slot machine, eh? Is it shucked or unshucked? It's fucked, but is it shucked? Seriously, I'm having trouble understanding the simile. He's the slot machine, right? She's like the coin you put in the slot, except she's an oyster? Is the shell on or off? Because that would really affect the feeling — for the oyster and the slot machine. I'm not getting the whole male-female anatomy of this. Shouldn't the woman be the slot machine and isn't the man, if he's the oyster, presumably shucked, not doing too well sexually?

I Google "like an oyster in a slot machine," and — aha! — it's an old George Burns joke about an old man having sex: "Have you ever tried to put an oyster in a slot machine?"

The author of that new biography of Warren Beatty — reviewed at the first link — may have had his leg pulled quite a few times. Like maybe 12,775 times.

30 comments:

I remember working in a large office in the mid 1980's and a co-worker had gone to New Orleans for vacation. So on a casual Friday, she came into the office with a souvenir T-shirt from her vacation. It read:

"Shuck Me, Suck Me, Eat Me Alive"

Needless to say a few people spit their coffee out when they saw the shirt.

Yes, but did Beatty score with Madonna? Did his oyster hit three cherries? This post may attract lots of traffic as the subtle metaphor is analysed fore and aft.The Guardian will soon have a Scientific report about the role of oysters and the slot machines causing evolutionary survival of only the fittest oysters, which in turn makes all men sex addicts.

This comes out in an anecdote related by Fania Pascal, who knew [Wittgenstein] in Cambridge in the 1930s:

'I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: "I feel just like a dog that has been run over." He was disgusted: "You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like."'

....

Pascal's Wittgenstein does not intend to accuse her of lying, but of misrepresentation of another sort. She characterizes her feeling as "the feeling of a run-over dog." She is not really acquainted, however, with the feeling to which this phrase refers. Of course, the phrase is far from being complete nonsense to her; she is hardly speaking gibberish. What she says has an intelligible connotation, which she certainly understands. Moreover, she does know something about the quality of the feeling to which the phrase refers: she knows at least that it is an undesirable and unenjoyable feeling, a bad feeling. The trouble with her statement is that it purports to convey something more than simply that she feels bad. Her characterization of her feeling is too specific; it is excessively particular. Hers is not just any bad feeling but, according to her account, the distinctive kind of bad feeling that a dog has when it is run over. To the Wittgenstein in Pascal's story, judging from his response, this is just bullshit.

Now assuming that Wittgenstein does indeed regard Pascal's characterization of how she feels as an instance of bullshit, why does it strike him that way? It does so, I believe, because he perceives what Pascal says as being -- roughly speaking, for now -- unconnected to a concern with the truth. Her statement is not germane to the enterprise of describing reality. She does not even think she knows, except in the vaguest way, how a run-over dog feels. Her description of her own feeling is, accordingly, something that she is merely making up. She concocts it out of whole cloth; or, if she got it from someone else, she is repeating it quite mindlessly and without any regard for how things really are.

It is for this mindlessness that Pascal's Wittgenstein chides her. What disgusts him is that Pascal is not even concerned whether her statement is correct.

I don't know as I would want carnal knowledge of 12,775 women, but I would want carnal knowledge of Julie Christie 12,775 times....Warren Beatty seems to have had a significantly better than average life. I would be grateful if someone could come up with a really killing wisecrack to dismiss the vacuity of his life.

His first scalp was the (gay) playwright William Inge, author of “Come Back, Little Sheba” and “Picnic,” who hoped to cast him in the part of a man so sexually confident that “he feels a wreath has been hung on his penis.”

Now I know where the term "hanging wreathes" comes from. Yeah, I know that feeling.